signed and dated bottom right and top left ‘Sandile Zulu 2004’ and
inscribed with title on reverse

Sandile Zulu works with the elements of fire, water, earth and air
in creating his large canvases and installations. In the catalogue
accompanying the group exhibition Personal affects: power and
poetics
in contemporary South African art, hosted by the Museum for
African
Art in New York in 2004, he describes the personal and historical
associations of his distinctive working process:

‘I began using fire in 1990 at a time when the political
situation
in South Africa was very violent… I was using fire in a way that was
“fighting fire with fire”. The state was using fire … there were
fires around the country; people were burning things and people were
thinking that was part of the revolutionary act. So for me it was a
revolutionary suggestion. I was, in fact, advocating it – that it was
the right thing to do, because it has to do with … the concept of
radical transformation of the revolution … But I think, thereafter,
there was growth in my work, and I started to consider the air and
“the winds of change”, and I started incorporating the actual wind
into my work. I was using wind to blow the flame … There were also
other symbolic references within the fire, because fire heals, fire
warms us, because fire is a social thing in a sense: it brings us
together. And it was important for the fire to bring us together at
that point in time so that we could be together in struggle – in the
fight for liberation …

‘In the same vein I began to use water, and I began to use soil,
because these elements have healing substances within them. Using
earth was also a reference to my belonging, a reference to land, as
well as a reference to healing, and to ownership. And the reference
to land was also a reference to dispossession, and to the desire to
reclaim land. And that’s the same reason I use water, because these
are things that belong to the earth.’